Are you an ENTP and wonder why you can't get things done when working for yourself?

[Simon Angel]

I appreciate you sharing the depression, Zack. First step is self-compassion. Knowing you're not alone and setting the intention to be kind to yourself. I sometimes think I'm out of ideas but I know that can't be true. The real issue for me is, will this idea be worth the work.

And now the issue is clear: what will be the overarching idea that is a big need for many people, that I can tag my various ideas of curiosity too. I like Knicks suggestion very much: learn a skill. This reminds me of past successes where I was able to stick with learning programming over many years. I suppose my curiosity was successfully played with because each day would be a new page to program - a new function, a new way to connect with and use the database. It remained fun until I got to the challenge of Object Oriented Programming and hit a wall. Learning a skill over time is another great framework around which we can tag all our curiosities.

On routine, have you heard of "Priming" or the "Miracle Morning" (I think I also read about this in James Clear's book "Atomic Habits")... basic idea: do your routine first thing in the morning. Whatever is most important to you. I do meditation, visualization, affirmation, gratitude, prayer, reading, and exercise. Before my "will power" (aka ENxP curiosity energy) runs out.

We can kick a$$.

Let's do this!

Was just going through your post and noticed some clear "function speak" in your sentences, so I figured I'd share:

I appreciate you sharing the depression, Zack.

Introverted Feeling (Fi)

First step is self-compassion. Knowing you're not alone and setting the intention to be kind to yourself

Extroverted Thinking (Te) followed by Introverted Feeling (Fi)

The real issue for me is, will this idea be worth the work.

Extroverted Thinking (Te)

And now the issue is clear: what will be the overarching idea that is a big need for many people, that I can tag my various ideas of curiosity too. I like Knicks suggestion very much: learn a skill.

Extroverted Thinking (Te)

This reminds me of past successes where I was able to stick with learning programming over many years

Introverted Sensing (Si)

I suppose my curiosity was successfully played with because each day would be a new page to program - a new function, a new way to connect with and use the database. It remained fun until I got to the challenge of Object Oriented Programming and hit a wall. Learning a skill over time is another great framework around which we can tag all our curiosities.

Extroverted Intuition (Ne), obvious lack of Introverted Thinking (Ti), and Ne again.

On routine, have you heard of "Priming" or the "Miracle Morning" (I think I also read about this in James Clear's book "Atomic Habits")... basic idea: do your routine first thing in the morning. Whatever is most important to you. I do meditation, visualization, affirmation, gratitude, prayer, reading, and exercise. Before my "will power" (aka ENxP curiosity energy) runs out.

Te, Si.

Possible MBTI types: ENFP

 

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[DonnieBrasco]

Thanks for the tips but could you send an image of this because its kinda hard to picture it.

info: Mind map - Wikipedia

the plans or papersheets on my wall look pretty similar to the attachment

 

[Kybalion]

I know this might go a bit against the original idea of this post, but does anyone have a lightweight productivity system that works? I tried to adapt this GOLD! - Achieve Laser FOCUS + PRODUCTIVITY With The System Legendary Fastlaners Use... but I couldn't stick. Maybe it just needs some more adjustment for my specific case.

I'm trying to come up with what a "productivity system" would need. I'm talking about the "big picture" side, not (necessarily) specific to a particular project. On top of my head:

1. Makes sure that you aren't all over the place and fail to take action due to being too scattered
2. Helps keeping track of progress
3. Helps keeping track of those million ideas you start but don't quite finish (yet)
4. Doesn't distract too much from the actual work and the spontaneity of explore and exploit
5. Not sure about this one, but probably helps if it allows mixing tasks from different projects, so you don't lose track of anything

I don't think it gets more lightweight than the GSD system which you linked to. It also contains all of the functionality you're looking for:

1. You can set big-picture long-term goals (see the very left side of the Trello board)
2. Keep track of progress by color coding tasks (add labels eg. red = urgent, orange = weak progress, yellow = almost done, green = done)
3. Use ''Inbox'' or Someday/Maybe tab for the million ideas you have
4. Every day set 3 tasks that include the actual work you need to do- keep them as vague or as specific you need (depending on the exploration required)
5. You can insert as many tasks from different projects in the "in progress" tab

The bottom line is - it's not about the system you use - but how you use it.

 

[Kybalion]

Where I think it doesn't quite work for me is that there are some projects that are quite big, so they benefit from a separate Trello/Spreadsheet. Say "take X business to $YYYYY", that's a pretty complex project that might need a board where you have also a list of tasks that need completing. Then I find myself duplicating tasks on GSD and the project-specific board/sheet, which is an overhead I like to avoid.

I might try MJ's Sumo app as well, and see what works best.

I use comment section of a specific task when there are too many steps involved.

Also I would categorize "take X business to $YYYYY" as a goal rather than task.

 

[ValueSystems]

I know this might go a bit against the original idea of this post, but does anyone have a lightweight productivity system that works? I tried to adapt this GOLD! - Achieve Laser FOCUS + PRODUCTIVITY With The System Legendary Fastlaners Use... but I couldn't stick. Maybe it just needs some more adjustment for my specific case.

I'm trying to come up with what a "productivity system" would need. I'm talking about the "big picture" side, not (necessarily) specific to a particular project. On top of my head:

1. Makes sure that you aren't all over the place and fail to take action due to being too scattered
2. Helps keeping track of progress
3. Helps keeping track of those million ideas you start but don't quite finish (yet)
4. Doesn't distract too much from the actual work and the spontaneity of explore and exploit
5. Not sure about this one, but probably helps if it allows mixing tasks from different projects, so you don't lose track of anything

I've tried many things.
GTD, todoist app, google tasks, miro boards, etc.

The most success I've had is with a simple:

1. Physical notebook (daily todos) - todos
2. google calendar - calendar
3. google keep - ideas (note taking app, syncs between all my devices, I write ideas on my phone on the go)

Keeps everything simple and flexible.

I found I can't sustain a complicated system overtime.
At least for me, I need my system to be bullet proof and adapt to any situation without fail.

Rather have too simple but that holds steady than perfect but breaks with the wind.

Hope it helps!

 

[Simon Angel]

Do people actually care about the MBTI anymore?
I thought it was just a fad.

The 16 personalities test is a fad and highly inaccurate.

Jung's work on cognitive functions is life changing once you understand how your brain works and why you think the way you think.

Of course, it's considered little more than pseudoscience, but if that's true then it's weird how I am able to accurately guess people's personality type 90-95% of the time.

Two tests worth taking:

Keys 2 Cognition - Cognitive Processes Assessment

John's Personality Test

 

[DWX]

Well, it's safe to say my results are inconclusive.

I remember going down the personality-type rabbit hole a good few years back. Like most people here, I did the Briggs test (I think I ended up being an INFJ or whatever the rare one was... not sure).

The problem is I find myself over-scrutinising the questions and re-doing tests all the time, which is probably why my results resemble something like a kid's trick-or-treat candy bag. I don't know about anyone else, but I have this weird thing where I love the idea of structure/routine - and feel better for using them - but somehow struggle to remain consistent with the damn thing.

Anyhoo, tangents aside, I'm glad this thread was revived - it's been a fascinating read.

I can definitely relate to much of what has already been posted like getting bored quickly with an idea, etc. I also dig the suggestion of learning a skill that takes years to master (shout out to whoever shared that).

Thanks to @Simon Angel and everyone who chimed in. It's been a thought-provoking discussion.

 

[Remiremi]

4. Web design / Digital marketing - Started out in May last year, did 2 sites for free. I completely forgot about it until I decided to go at it again after going in debt from my 5th dropshipping attempt THIS May. Ended up learning how to cold call, close meetings and sales and I'm not in debt anymore. I can't really scale this locally and I'm not entirely interested in the idea anyway, so I decided to start reaching out to US businesses with cold emails + video audits. My pronounciation improved a ton and I'm sending out e-mails but it's something like 10 video emails one day, 3 the next, 0 for a week and then 5, 10, 15 the next few days. Then another idea catches my interest or I start reminiscing about League of Legends/Formula 1 and my theoretical streaming/sim racing success.

It's amazing that you start working on your persuasion skills at a young age!

I did something similar when I was twenty-two and it as served me tremendously since. (I spent a gap year learning sales as a door to door salesman in Australia.) And funny thing my English improved a lot too as well. My French accent was too thick to communicate effectively in English before I started.

It's very good to hear you have managed to get out of debt! Congratulations!

I am curious, have you ever considered working for a small tech startup or something similar? (basically being in a team where you all strive to build something impossible in a chaotic and flexible environment) It's a wonderful way to discover how productive and instrumental you can be in a Team! Very good for confidence, skills, and building a network.

I ask that because from what I read in your post, it seems you are mostly involved in lone wolf ventures. If that's the case, it may do you good to meet the side of you who thrive in a team.

 

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[Remiremi]

I just read your Intro and you are only 26 and came to those conclusions? Bloody hell, I feel old. I have read a lot of non fiction books, psychology and what not, but nobody has ever laid it out in such simple terms that you can actually understand.
It is an amazing post, I am one of those ENTP's which has always had those issues. My wife hand my friends have always complained about me starting something new every other day, that I get these great ideas and they die out with the same speed they come to live.
When you reach 45 and read post like yours and realising that the author is half of your age, you fell really dumb. You feel that you were oblivious all those years.
Anyhow, great you are here and shared your thoughts.

Best wishes!
Pete

Oh Pete, I am sorry, the goal of this post was not to be a downer.

On the bright side, if you let run your genius wild, it's impossible to predict what you will achieve in the next three to six months.

Think about it this way, our inspiration cycle is usually around two to four days.

It means there are at least fifty cycles at your disposal for trying out those great ideas you have, just in the next six months.

Fifty!

Multiply it by twenty to estimate how many trials you will have during this decade.

It's a game of number, and you are on the winning side of it!

It makes our age irrelevant, we can try to pursue so many of those great ideas that I strongly believe you still get the same odds of success at thirty than sixty!

Just go for it Pete!

I wish you the best

 

[tonibob]

Oh Pete, I am sorry, the goal of this post was not to be a downer.

On the bright side, if you let run your genius wild, it's impossible to predict what you will achieve in the next three to six months.

Think about it this way, our inspiration cycle is usually around two to four days.

It means there are at least fifty cycles at your disposal for trying out those great ideas you have, just in the next six months.

Fifty!

Multiply it by twenty to estimate how many trials you will have during this decade.

It's a game of number, and you are on the winning side of it!

It makes our age irrelevant, we can try to pursue so many of those great ideas that I strongly believe you still get the same odds of success at thirty than sixty!

Just go for it Pete!

I wish you the best

Oh no, there is almost nothing to put me down, except me . I am pretty sure you know it already! Also I am very thick skinned, but great encouraging words from somebody who is about to experience life! You are way ahead of 99% of the people in this world, cherish it and run wild with your dreams. I am starting new life, I have opened just recently new page of my life, still have few unsolved issues to sort out, but I am on new path!

I will follow your progress with great interest as you have bright future of front of you.
By the way my background is in IT, so who know we can work on something in the neat future!

 

[Simon Angel]

T H A N K Y O U !!!

Few examples of my own:
- played 5 different sports, team captain playing handball, was decent at 2, sucked at 2
- picked up guitar, learned basic chords to play favorite songs -> guitar collecting dust in my bedroom today
- fitness? my buddies call me "the transformer" because of how fast I'm able to gain weight and look disgusting but also get back in shape and look amazing in record time
- started an advertising agency with a friend a few yrs back, closed 3 minor clients and 1 big fish in a month -> moved on and left it all to him for no particular reason

I can go on more but the point is clear here. I am struggling to be consistent even today

Ever think we're just clones running on some sort of ENTP-AI? I was a beast at football btw.

I actually uncovered my guitar from the dust pile a few days ago and noticed one of the strings had killed itself.

Muscle memory is my favorite friend as well. And I actually remember talking with you about your advertising agency, I was dropshipping at the time.

Remember when we shat on that guy in a particular forum for promoting NoFap many years ago when we were kids? It's actually been life changing for me.

Yeah, I think we should just catch up soon lol

 

[Simon Angel]

It's like anything else in life.

Nothing is 100% accurate about anything in life.

Many things will impact your results on something like a Myers Briggs:

• Not understanding certain words or questions in the test
• Not answering as your true self, but what society told you to be and how to act
• Your mood for the day
• Your mood for the week
• Memory
• Your interpetaion of what the questions are/mean
• etc

But these above will impact you on ANY test you take in life, right?

I took the MBTI test over several years growing up. I would be 1 of 3 things each time. Talking about maybe 1 time a year growing up. On average though, it would come back as 1 type the majority of the time. The minority would be 1 of the other 2.

A few years ago, I decided to take it on purpose many times with a few days or weeks between tests.

Out of many many tries, I kept coming back to INTJ. There were a few times something else would pop up but it was very small %.

Based on that, I decided to do the same routine with Ennagram. Same type of results, majority was 1 type but I kept getting another a slim amount of times.

I then did a lot of research into INTJ and 5w4's online. Not taking the test anymore, but research into careers, weakness, strengths, etc. All of that research kinda confirmed both labels.

I then proceeded to take other tests like the Strength's Finder test and more. Many of them came back with data that reinforced the INTJ and 5W4 outcome.

Within the last year, I took an even more in-depth approach.

I'm leaning a lot on INTP now.

Very very very similar in many ways to INTJ. Still connects on 5w4 and the other tests I took.

I don't think you can ever be 100%, but knowing at least 90% can make a difference.

You probably need to take it a few times and really get down to answering these things honestly from yourself, your core.

It might take months to do that.

I agree with most of what you said, but there's a huge difference between INTP and INTJ. Look up cognitive functions, especially being a Ti dominant (INTP) vs Ni dominant (INTJ).

Here's a few questions for you:

Were you late to school? Are you often late now?

Prefer or better at strategy games that involve planning and foreseeing or MOBAs/shooters who are fast paced and involve a lot of mechanical/tactical skill rather than strategical?

Have known since you were little what you wanted to achieve in life and have been shaping your whole life starting back from when you were a kid towards achieving it?

Secretly believe that communism is better than capitalism?

See everyone as equal or as below/above you?

Do you think that you know a lot or do you think you don't know anything?

What personal qualities do you wish you had more of?

Are you sure you even exist? What proof do you have?

And last but not least, post the results you get from this test: John's Personality Test (pretty quick)

 

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[Bekit]

Because an INTP and an INTJ only have 1 letter different between types, but their functions are completely different.

For INTP that's (in order) Ti Ne Si Fe.

For INTJ - Ni Te Fi Se

For ENTP - Ne Ti Fe Si (same functions as INTP but different order). As you can see ENTP is like a mirror to the INTJ in terms of function order but the functions themselves are actually opposite.

I am super intrigued. I've never heard of this. Ni Te Fi stuff.

Where did you learn about this part of it, and how did you get to the point where you can accurately predict someone's personality?

Any particular resources you'd recommend?

 

[Remiremi]

This post is relevant to the in-depth guide I did over at:

GOLD! - MINDSET - Not Fulfilled? Depressed? Maybe You Need An Alignment

I'm sticking my neck out here because I know that SOME people will consider this topic along the same lines of "action-faking", "passion following", and other guru life coaching BS. Yes this will be a massive post, covering several posts actually. It gets deep and gets into tapping emotions...

www.thefastlaneforum.com

^^ Which breaks down into finding out your MBTI and Ennagram and using that to propel yoruself forward ( among other things )

Thanks for the share.

Yes absolutely! Actually @eliquid it's your post that subconsciously gave me the permission to write this post, as I used to think personality types research would be frown upon here. I was looking for specific ENTP advice for entrepreneurs and when I couldn't find enough to quench my thirst, I decided to condense my researchs here! Thanks for opening the way

 

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[eliquid]

Look up cognitive functions, especially being a Ti dominant (INTP) vs Ni dominant (INTJ).

Sure.

I know all about cognitive functions. I've done some pretty in-depth research over the years.

The problem is with some of these tests is, there is no addressing the "strength of the ability" or that people fundamentally prefer one thing over the other, not a bit of both. Those that try to score a strength, really aren't scoring that.

As with all self-tests, they are just an indication of their probable overall type.

Most flaws with these tests are people not having the correct feedback or giving answers based on bias. There aren't too many people really touching their core when they do these tests.

I think you can be a balance of both Ti and Ni.

I know from personal experience how I think and make decesions, and many times its a mix of both. At times I lean Ti, at times I lean Ni

 

[Remiremi]

On another note, ever since reading this, I've been listening to some Youtube videos about this personality type. As an INTP I tend to be restless until I understand something on a fundamental level. As it turns out, these personality theories go a lot deeper than I thought! I'm excited to learn more about the nuances of each type as it compares to others.

If you ever want to get on a call and chat about being one of these rare breeds, let me know!

Yes that's quite the rabbit hole haha. Sure would love to chat about this let's set that up!

 

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[Simon Angel]

Go meta - use all of those INTP, INTJ and others.
Decouple YOU from personality.

So to You that are finding reflection of themselves in those replies: ....Nah

I don't get it, sorry. Your writing language (do this, do that) and you being patronizing screams INTJ/ENTJ (high Te function) and your disregard of the theory + "decoupling yourself from personality" points to the Fi function, which again is also in the INTJ/ENTJ personalities' stack.

Like I said, MBTI and cognitive functions has shown me who I really am, but did not give me an excuse to be lazy or undisciplined because I'm an ENTP. Instead it has pointed my weaknesses out to me and I've been developing my inferior functions.

 

[Simon Angel]

I am super intrigued. I've never heard of this. Ni Te Fi stuff.

Where did you learn about this part of it, and how did you get to the point where you can accurately predict someone's personality?

Any particular resources you'd recommend?

A shit ton of tests, reddit, looking up famous people and fictional characters online to see what they are. With time I've developed my own framework for typing people. The personality database is cool.

 

[Remiremi]

PS: If you are curious about how to use Personality Tests to better your life and are looking for a guideline about how to do it. You can follow this guide written by @eliquid here:

GOLD! - MINDSET - Not Fulfilled? Depressed? Maybe You Need An Alignment

I'm sticking my neck out here because I know that SOME people will consider this topic along the same lines of "action-faking", "passion following", and other guru life coaching BS. Yes this will be a massive post, covering several posts actually. It gets deep and gets into tapping emotions...

www.thefastlaneforum.com

 

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[Itizn]

I've been a fan of all forms of typology for many years now. While I have scored as an ENTP after several MBTI tests, I personally prerer the enneagram (I'm a 7) for any instropection, peace of mind and for leisurely reading. That being said I do strongly agree with how I behave based on the ENTP summary, I just see myself as a 7 more than anything else.

As for your post, I was initially going to skim through it as it's very long (lack of attention spans heavily found amongst ENTP), but realized you made some interesting points and gave it the whole read.

Thank you for typing this out as it's not something I have ever really come across, at least not in the way you presented it. I have been in a heavily extended period of being stagnant, lackadaisical, and distracted.

Taking hours to do something simple, laying in bed for 5 hours before I can even fall asleep, waking up dejected and unable to get out or bed even if I'm technically awake. This has led me to pondering the past few weeks how to best live with the organized chaos I seem to naturally prefer but you have laid out a great blueprint.

Thanks again.

 

[EVMaso]

Hello friends, are you an ENTP? Are you struggling with finishing things? Are you wondering why you can't seem to follow the monk-like discipline you crave so much?

This post is for you. (ps: This post may also apply to INTP, INFP, and ENFP, but it's not guaranteed. It has been primarily written for my fellow ENTP in mind.)

If you are a bit like me, and you probably are, you admire people of the ENTJ or INTJ types. The Elon Musks, the smart lads with the incredible power of execution.

They decide to do something and they just do it.

And you want that power, you want to be awesome at execution...

You have so many ideas (that you believe are amazing and revolutionary) if you concretize those ideas you will be on top of the world, don't you?

But when you start to work on them on your own, as a side-project or a business, your work ethic is gone, nowhere to be seen.

That's weird because you have an incredible work ethic everywhere else, be it at your job or in a team. You are always craving to learn more and become better. You always produce top-grade stuff and you are relentless. You are proud of this. And people agree with that statement.

You then, think you can make it out on your own, as skillful as you are, it would be a shame not to try.

But when you take the leap, you come to quickly realize, it's gonna be hard than expected.

First obstacle? Yourself.

You just can't seem to do what you know needs to be done.

You face a procrastination level more intense than anything you've never met in your life. Except maybe for that time you wanted to confess your love to your crush as a teenager.

You need to understand you are not a cold-blooded strategist that will follow a plan to completion.

You must understand this: You are an explorer! You go where your interest leads you. And when you are motivated by a will to explore your curiosity, YOU ARE UNSTOPPABLE.

The other side of the coin says, when you are disinterested in the tasks at hand, you feel bored as hell and will probably find a way to escape from doing the tasks at hand.

Your driving force is not the perspective of making shit loads of cash, neither it is the perspective of freedom, and sorry to break it to you, your driving force is not your desire to change the world for the better.

Your driving force is your curiosity. This is your motor.

With curiosity, you are a tsunami. Nothing will get in the way of the answer you seek.

Without curiosity, you are very good at finding excuses to not do what bores you out.

Why does it matter?

It matters because you will probably do the following mistake...

You will decide on a goal and following contemporary advice decide to make it S.M.A.R.T. Which basically means realistic with an arbitrary deadline.

Your strategizing mind will help you devise a sound plan of action, and your knack for creativity help you discerned a way you can even kill two birds with one stone.

You talk about it with whoever might be willing to listen and you feel on top of the world.

The first day? You are killing it. The second day? You are killing it.

The third day, you get sidetracked...

One month later? You haven't even achieved 10% of what you set out to do.

You were supposed to be able to do it in three months by focusing intensely.

Now, this seem very compromised. You feel miserable and guilty. You wonder if you are any good at anything.

This scenario keeps happening again, again, and again... Until you give up or you stumble upon the truth.

Let's give a closer look at your primary hypothesis.

So you were thinking you can do it in just three months by focusing intensely?

Well good news, you were half right.

You can do it...

...But not in three months.

Why?

Because even though you can focus intensely consistently on the subject you are curious about.

You can't stay curious about the same subject consistently.

So your curiosity will lead you to places you can't predict.

You just know one thing for sure, if you were interested in something one day, you will be interested in that thing again. You just can't predict when.

You will actually bring that project to completion effortlessly, but not in the shortest time possible.

Instead of the three months, you estimated, it will likely be six to nine months.

And that's ok, because that won't be the only thing you have done in those six to nine months.

You have an unprecedented capacity for multithreading, you just can't allocate all your threads to one project. It must be different projects. This is how you are.

If you are curious about something, you will want to drop the ball on your current project to satisfy your curiosity. And you must do it.

But every time you follow your curiosity you must find a way to get away with more than just knowledge.

Unused knowledge is ephemeral, vanishing as swiftly as it was acquired.

You must build something from the fruit of your recently acquired knowledge that will stand the test of time and bring you a small but lasting advantage.

It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be there.

THE KEY THING TO TAKE AWAY FROM THIS: You must shift from a consumer to a producer.

You must start producing stuff. Start businesses, start a blog, do everything you want, but DO. (keyword do, not just read about/learn about etc....)

It's normal for you to getting informed about something you are interested in, but you need to act on it. You must build something out of it. You must share it with the world.

You must create things and release them in the world. I REPEAT. You must create things and release them in the word.

You don't have to follow a great mastermind plan, you don't have to follow a routine or fixed planning. You don't have to torture yourself to heck out every last bit of productivity there's inside you.

You just need to listen to yourself and follow your curiosity. And to do it everyday.

Your strength is the speed at which you can pivot.

You can change your mind and start working on something different than what you were doing, at full speed, and immediately.

You can survey a complicated question an bring back multiple possible answers at the speed of light.

You are impulsive and adaptable. You can do anything you want because you will always find a way... As long as you are interested.

This surges of productivity come at a cost. Your interest in a particular thing has a very short shelf-life. One to two days top. Sometimes it's less than a couple of hours.

If you don't catch the wave of curiosity, it's gone, and sometimes it's gone for several weeks or months.

So expecting yourself to work on the same project, without interruptions every day for three months in a row? ... You are being oblivious to your own nature, my friend.

You probably know that by now, the biggest predictor of entrepreneurial success is consistency.

Then how can you expect success if you can't stay on track and schedule for more than two weeks?

You need to build a different kind of consistency than a rigid routine and prison-like tight schedules.

You need to play on your strength: Explore and Exploit ASAP.

Don't explore something without bringing back a treasure from your adventure.

Examples:

• You were curious about nutrition and muscle-growth gym regimen? You binge-learned every possible way to do it (instead of doing your job lol). You just acquired way too much knowledge to expect yourself to remember it a week from now. So applying it consistently? Out of your league.
  The solution? Swiftly assemble a training and nutrition guide based on what you just explored, package it in a nice PDF, and then share it with the world. You can decide to monetize it or just to share it for free on a forum, it doesn't matter. It will help some people, and that's good for your karma. Second benefit, the day you will want to actually go to the gym, you can just follow your own guideline. Two birds, one stone.
• You are learning Python and discover the weird world of Decorators and Closures. This stuff is basically out of your league and at your level you will probably never use it. But you can't shake off the feeling. You start binging and learning mystical stuff. Before you go back to the real world to what will actually move you forward in the grand scheme of things, put on together in one shot a blog post that you will publish on Medium behind the paywall. Boom! Three birds, one stone: Personal Branding & Portfolio : check; a very slim source of additional passive income: check; a quick way to retrieve your long-lost knowledge about closures when you finally need it, three years from now: check.
• Well you see the idea, indulge your instinct and before the honeymoon ends, build something that will last. In this way, you will shift from an inconsistent being to a prolific and polymath builder. You will shift from consumer to producer.

So by now, if you are an ENTP, you are probably envisioning what I am talking about.

I want to add a couple of other points... Playing on your strength also means you need to mitigate your weakness.

Your strength and weaknesses are two faces of the same coin. You can't get one without the other.

During my short time on earth as an entrepreneurial ENTP, I have summarized below everything I know about mitigating our innate weaknesses.








Weakness mitigation tips #1: You can only respect HARD DEADLINES.

There's two kind of deadlines: HARD deadlines and SOFT deadlines.

HARD deadlines are deadlines you must respect. When you are under hard deadlines, you work like crazy to respect them. Those are often imposed by a promise or the external environment. Hard Deadlines are why you have so much work ethic when you work for somebody else.

SOFT deadlines are deadlines you don't have obligation to respect. Basically they are deadlines you can bullshit yourselves out of easily. Often those are arbitrary and self-imposed, for example, SMART Goals. Soft deadlines are why you have so few work ethic when you work for yourself.

The litmus test is simple, "Can I find a way to not respect that deadline?".
If you start generating a thousand ideas about how to do so, then it's a soft deadline and this deadline means nothing to you and will bring you nothing. (except guilt)

So you being too clever may start to think? "Oh, gotcha I just need to change every deadline into a HARD deadline".

NO! Don't do this. The only way to do this is to take risks and to put yourself at a disadvantage. You are basically gambling on yourself just to create the pressure necessary to do the work. This is a horrible way to live your life.

(ex of this destructive behavior: Damaging relationships just to be sure you will do something. Wasting all your money to let the pressure of feeding your family let you work like crazy, etc...)

As an ENTP what you crave is freedom, this way of proceeding (a.k.a. burn your bridges) is the polar opposite of freedom. It will make you feel miserable and burn you out, also it sucks because you are destructing what you build to build more. This is terrible. Don't do it.

Just understand that soft deadlines mean nothing to you and plan accordingly.

Don't gamble on a deadline you can bullshit yourself out of.

Soft deadlines are a distraction to you, those are noise. SMART goals stuff like that, forget those, they don't work with you.

But also, don't take on too many hard deadlines at the same time.

Those hard deadlines are like prison chains to you. And what you crave is freedom.

If you enchain yourself too much, you will burnout.

This leave the question. How an ENTP can get stuff done?

Weakness Mitigation tip #2: Boredom is like a steel wall to you. You can't get through it and have to wait for the door of curiosity to open.

So what should I do? The ENTP equivalent of taking massive actions.

You must play to your strength and mitigate your weakness.

Follow your curiosity and build something from your exploration. Build it quickly, in a couple of hours or max. You must build it before your curiosity wither.

Understand that boredom is your limit. You can only go through boredom excruciatingly. This is your hard deadline for every project, you must finish the milestone before boredom takes you and your curiosity wants to go somewhere else.

A quick note about perfection?
What you build must never be perfect. Perfection is your enemy, it makes you anxious and buries you in analysis paralysis. (= you don't do shit and feel shitty about it)

What should I do when I am bored with a project and want to do something else?

You must stop and do something else. You will get back to the project eventually if you were interested once, you will be interested twice.

Weakness Mitigation tip #3: Don't make plans more detailed than a rough outline.

A detailed and carefully crafted plan is wasted on you... You will never follow it through.

Don't spend time creating detailed stratagems to get to your goals. THIS IS A WASTE OF TIME, DO SOMETHING ELSE INSTEAD.

You are tactical and agile. The time horizon you can plan on is limited to a couple of hours. It's very short.

For the long term, you can guess how things are gonna roughly. Your intuition power is often on point.

It's even more powerful when you feed your intuition with data. How do you get your data?

Every time you want to plan your future, turn to your past instead and log what you have been doing in the last few days.

You want to empirically determine your speed of production. Take the time to keep track of what you did during the day.

You can use this basic template:

Questions to gather data about your explorations:
1. What have I been interested in the last few day?
2. How did I go about exploring that interests?
3. What did I get out of it?
4. How long did it took?
5. What have I build-out of what I discovered? How have I used it?
6. How long did it took?
7. Is there thing I can do better next time? Things I need to avoid next time?

Answer those questions every two to three days. (Optimally, every time you finish a cycle of Exploration / Exploitation)

Store those answers in a way you can easily access those later. (Don't just write on a spare napkin and throw it away).

Weakness Mitigation tip # 4: Don't try to follow a perfect routine.

In the same way, hard deadlines are a chain to you, trying to respect arbitrary daily planning will lower your available energy for the day.

Instead, have a shortlist of 5 mandatory items you must do during the day and that you can do quickly.

If you can't cross every item of that list in less than 100 minutes, the list is too long.

An example can be:

• Meditate 10 minutes.
• Walk the dog.
• Do the dishes.
• Quick workout at the gym.
• Write in my journal.

Sometimes you will meditate in the morning, sometimes before you go to bed, sometimes during the commute. Doesn't matter, you need the flexibility to do things when you are ready for those.

What matters is that you crossed every item of the list, not when you crossed those.

The rest of the day, follow your curiosity relentlessly and get something out of it.

Weakness Mitigation tip #5: Keep your Anxiety in check... It keeps your from entering a Flow state.

First of all, You must strive to get into Flow. Getting into flow every day is your bread and butter as an ENTP.

Though there's one thing that can keep you from entering a Flow state even if you are well rested, in good health, and will push you to immediate-rewards behavior.(ex:... alcohol, infinite scrolling, eating way too much sugar, gambling, buying spree, opening 200+ tabs on your web browser about a shitty subject you don't even care about)

This thing is Anxiety.

You must learn to effectively manage your anxiety level. Because when highly stressed and without a hard deadline, you are basically dysfunctional and will get nothing done.
(Please remember that high-stress level and hard pressure to get things done is a miserable way to live your life. It's okay once in a while but don't abuse it.)

So do things that help you rest and recover. Make a conscious effort to recover and balance your innate restlessness.
Examples:
- Sport you genuinely enjoy
- Meditation
- Light encounter with your social circle
- Playing games
- Read books unrelated to your goals. (fiction, or history)
- Get a massage.
- Dance, Concert, Restaurant
- Journaling, gratitudes etc...

Weakness Mitigation tip #6: Inject a bit of order in your life.

Then, because you are so future and possibly oriented you need help to organize things that happened in your past.

• Some of us are a mess when it comes to meetings and time constraints or remembering special events like birthdays. ⇒ Get a calendar, note everything inside, check it often.
• Your life memory is foggy at best and can't remember specifics even if you try hard, it often means you are totally wrong about your achievements and efforts (often wrongly believe you never did anything right) ⇒ Spend time every day to journal about your life, log your decisions and log your achievements. Include specifics like mood, time spent on task etc... When in doubt about what you have been doing, you can read those logs to help you access data you would have forget otherwise.
• Revisiting your life is very difficult for you as you get immediately distracted. If you believe you have a trauma from your childhood (and most people have) ⇒ Consider going to a psychologist who will guide you through the fumes of your past.
• You want a boost of productivity and increase your odds of success in the short term. ⇒ Get an accountability coach that will help you add some order in your life. (Getting a coach is one of the ways to help you achieve soft deadlines you would not be able to honor otherwise), it also helps you clarify and be more surgical about your focus.
• You forget the things your family / entourage needs you to do (do the laundry, send wishes for birthday etc...)

Weakness Mitigation tip #7: Become more aware of your mind, thoughts and body.

You must strive to be aware of your mental state, to identify when you start to get bored and must finish asap or to identify when you are curious about something.

The best way to do so is to practice mindfulness meditation (yes seriously) and to do sports that demand to be aware of the mind-body connection.

This will help you be more tuned toward your sensations and thoughts. Which is key to live a more fluid and free life.

Weakness Mitigation tip #8: GET RID OF YOUR PHONE / SOCIAL MEDIA
Phones are engineered to suck your attention away from whatever your doing. Your attention is a raw resource they monetize.

As an ENTP you are curious and novelty-seeker, and you are very competent at indulging your curiosity for hours on end.

Attention vampires have access to brilliant minds that they pay a lot to spend their day engineering way to suck your attention for the sake of ad profits.

Against a phone, you are at the bottom of the food chain.

PHONES ARE YOUR NATURAL ENEMY.

Possible solutions to mitigate the damage from your phone:
- Destroy it.
- Use apps blocker like STAY-FOCUSED (android)
- Use phone blocker like FOREST. (ps: it doubles as a Pomodoro app, and is gamified which makes you less likely to bypass it, you sly fox)
- Use a way to track and realize how much time you waste on your phone, like STAY-FOCUSED. (prepare to be shocked)
- Change the color of your phone in grey-scale or invert white/black, attention vampires use flashy colors to suck you in, you can fight that by getting rid of colors.
How to do it with iPhone here, and how to do it with Android here.
- Destroy it.
- Buy a NOKIA 3310, a hand-held GPS, a vintage MP3 player, a nice watch, and a paper agenda. If you think about it, everybody has a phone so you don't really need one, as you can just ask to borrow the functionality you lack.

I repeat. GET RID OF YOUR PHONE. Thank me later.

Weakness Mitigation tip #9: You don't do well in a pond of sharks, you need a supportive and encouraging environment.

You are trusting and willing to see the best face of everyone you meet. You want to collaborate and share your knowledge.

You are good in a team and with people, especially when you can assume everybody is on the same side.

You want to trust people, and you usually demonstrate trust first. Keep doing that, it's one of your competitive edges.

But a word of caution, trusting people first doesn't mean people should be safe double-crossing you.

Of course, some foe will want to abuse your willingness to help.

If somebody abuses your trusting identity YOU MUST RETALIATE. I am serious.

You will know when somebody abuses your kindness. Your Machiavellian side will know immediately. DON'T MAKE EXCUSES FOR THE VILLAINS.

THEY CROSS YOU, YOU CROSS THEM. PERIOD.

ONCE YOU HAVE DEMONSTRATED YOU CAN BITE AS WELL AS YOU CAN SMILE and both sides are bleeding, YOU CAN THEN SHOW FORGIVENESS.

AFTER ALL, YOU DON'T LIKE CONFLICT.

This assumes that you are evolving in an environment where people willing to screw you are an anomaly, and most people are on your side.

If you realize that people wanting to screw you over are the norm, then you are in a pond of shark AND YOU MUST RUNAWAY ASAP.

Let the evil political game and the House of Cards vibe for the people who thrive in those corrosive environments.

This is not you.

You will thrive more in a group that is trusting and encouraging, united in a common cause.

The fact that you have a developed Machiavellian mind doesn't mean you must use it at 100%.

If people around you are mean, calculating, or vain. Leave, without looking back.

Weakness Mitigation tip #10: Don't bet on speed. Build an advantage for the long game instead.

Because, when you start out as an ENTP, you will never be the first to arrive somewhere... (When you will become an experienced ENTP, this will change, as your tactical velocity will be unheard of, but when you start, well... You are not the fastest.)
... You must not pick your battles based on rewards correlated with a short time to arrival... (Example, you are starting out with dropshipping, you see everybody is going for fidget spinners. Don't go for it, you will arrive after the battle.)
... Instead, You must pick your battle based on long term compounded rewards. (Example, learning skills that are difficult and valuable to master. Code, Copywriting, Writing, Consulting.)

Then once you start to have an edge that is difficult to replicate...(Example; you are a blockchain enthusiast, but you probably know things more in-depth than most of the other blockchain enthusiasts.)
... Pick a battle that will complement it and that triggers your curiosity (Example, starting a blog about blockchain + learning how to do first-class SEO).

Even though everybody was faster than you in the short run... (Example, your accountability partner Tom became a millionaire just in two years, and you were still in your parent basement)
... On the long run, you will establish a valuable strategic advantage that is hard for anybody else to replicate. (Example: Five years later, your Blockchain blog is ranked first on google and is monetized with ads, You keep getting people asking you to interview you and you started a consulting business about blockchain. You never made that much money in your life and you now have a strong network. You basically do what you want, when you want, with who you want, from anywhere you want.).




....


Alright I am getting bored, just one last thing before we go...

TLDR: implement the code written below in your daily life. It will do the trick, I know you will figure out the specifics on your own.

ENTP?

Be Patient and Restless

⬪

You must be patient in the long term.

You will get where you want.

But you won't get there in the shortest amount of time possible.

Because you will take so many detours.

So be patient.

⬪

You must be restless in the sort term.

Want to explore an option, fine, do it.

Go all the way.

Unleash your curiosity.

... But you must make a pact with yourself.

Every time you unleash your curiosity, you must build a memento and share it with the world.

A simple recipe...

1/ Explore until bored.

2/ Quickly build something valuable for others.

3/ Share it to the people who most need it.

You are an explorer and every time you go on an adventure, you bring back wonderful treasures, undiscovered before.

Promise yourself you won't keep those treasures to yourself and will share those with the world.

Once your oath is taken, go.

Explore.

Follow your curiosity relentlessly.

Everyday.

You are free now.

⬪

​

BONUS:

What does it look like when you are not playing to your strength and mitigating your weakness?:

You are doing something, let's call it interest A. You begin to be interested in interest B.
You decide to keep doing interest A.
You slowly get bored and pick up your phone.
Five hours later, you haven't finished working on interest A.
You feel guilty and have trouble falling asleep this evening.
You wake up, lethargic, it takes you four hours before finally getting to work on interest A.
It's excruciatingly boring but you manage to finish it. You begin to be interested in interest C.
You repress it and start working on interest B.
And so on and so on....

It feels like an uphill battle.

Also, it's depressing because you know your current velocity of execution is nowhere near your actual potential...

What does it look like when you play to your strength and mitigate your weaknesses?

You are doing something, let's call it interest A. You begin to be interested in interest B.

You switch your focus on interest B.
Five hours later you know everything you could know about interest B. You are still hungry for more.
You decide to produce something about your discovery. (for the sake of example and to give you an idea of what it could be, let's say it's an article you will put on medium behind the paywall and you include a bait to your newsletter.)
Three hours later you are done with the building phase, you share it with the world and go to bed.
You feel good and sleep well.
You wake up, early in the morning, your interest for interest A is back and you feel the urge to do something about it.
You jump out of bed and start working asap, forgetting breakfast. By noon you are done with interest A.
You begin to be interested in interest C. You start working immediately on interest C.
And so on and so on.

You are prolific and restless. Your cumulative speed of production is unheard of. You are proud of you.

Could you have been done with interest A sooner if you had double down on it? No. You can't get away with boredom. This is your limit.

This is why you need to be patient. You are like a wind vane, you keep turning. So you will get there. You just won't get there by the shortest path.

This is why you need to be restless. Because you have to take the detour and answer the calling of your curiosity, you have to move as fast as possible, or you will never finish anything.


....


Hope it helps,

Rémi

P.S.: Btw, from my slim understanding of typology, this can maybe apply also to INFP, ENFP, and INTP.

Thanks for this post.

I don't really subscribe to these personality test things. For instance I've taken Meyers-Briggs test 3 times in the past 2 years for various work related things, and each time it's been slightly different (I always get the "I" though).

That said I can definitely relate to many of the things you wrote down and I'll be trying out some of the tips you brought up. Thanks again.

 

[Remiremi]

Bit of a slowlane question! but I'm curious, what jobs are recommended for an ENTP? This could also help be an indicator for businesses that are good for ENTPs too.

Hello, you should not box yourself in based on the results on a scientifically dubious test.

Basically every kind of business or jobs are viable. Your type doesn't matter.

If you still interested by the answer to your question, here is a list, but beware.

If you like what to see you will suffer confirmation bias.

If you don't like what to see, remember that this is no better than using an horoscope to make an important decision.

ENTP Careers, Jobs, & Majors | Personality Junkie

By Dr. A.J. Drenth The ENTP personality type is versatile and intelligent with a broad array of interests. While capable of excellence in any number…

personalityjunkie.com

P.S.: it's important to realize that type is an indicator of how you think and perceive the world.

It's by no means an indicator of cognitive abilities or emotional abilities.

Meaning that ultimately becoming competent at anything is determined by your effort, never by your type.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[rockit11]

Appreciate the reply! I will admit, I have never felt my personality fit into my current career, which is writing government contracts. Most in the job enjoy minutiae and working by themselves. I enjoy neither as an extrovert and strategic thinker. I'll take a look at the list but will also bear in mind it's an indicator for how one perceives the world, thanks!

 

[Nick T]

Hello friends, are you an ENTP? Are you struggling with finishing things? Are you wondering why you can't seem to follow the monk-like discipline you crave so much?

This post is for you. (ps: This post may also apply to INTP, INFP, and ENFP, but it's not guaranteed. It has been primarily written for my fellow ENTP in mind.)

If you are a bit like me, and you probably are, you admire people of the ENTJ or INTJ types. The Elon Musks, the smart lads with the incredible power of execution.

They decide to do something and they just do it.

And you want that power, you want to be awesome at execution...

You have so many ideas (that you believe are amazing and revolutionary) if you concretize those ideas you will be on top of the world, don't you?

But when you start to work on them on your own, as a side-project or a business, your work ethic is gone, nowhere to be seen.

That's weird because you have an incredible work ethic everywhere else, be it at your job or in a team. You are always craving to learn more and become better. You always produce top-grade stuff and you are relentless. You are proud of this. And people agree with that statement.

You then, think you can make it out on your own, as skillful as you are, it would be a shame not to try.

But when you take the leap, you come to quickly realize, it's gonna be hard than expected.

First obstacle? Yourself.

You just can't seem to do what you know needs to be done.

You face a procrastination level more intense than anything you've never met in your life. Except maybe for that time you wanted to confess your love to your crush as a teenager.

You need to understand you are not a cold-blooded strategist that will follow a plan to completion.

You must understand this: You are an explorer! You go where your interest leads you. And when you are motivated by a will to explore your curiosity, YOU ARE UNSTOPPABLE.

The other side of the coin says, when you are disinterested in the tasks at hand, you feel bored as hell and will probably find a way to escape from doing the tasks at hand.

Your driving force is not the perspective of making shit loads of cash, neither it is the perspective of freedom, and sorry to break it to you, your driving force is not your desire to change the world for the better.

Your driving force is your curiosity. This is your motor.

With curiosity, you are a tsunami. Nothing will get in the way of the answer you seek.

Without curiosity, you are very good at finding excuses to not do what bores you out.

Why does it matter?

It matters because you will probably do the following mistake...

You will decide on a goal and following contemporary advice decide to make it S.M.A.R.T. Which basically means realistic with an arbitrary deadline.

Your strategizing mind will help you devise a sound plan of action, and your knack for creativity help you discerned a way you can even kill two birds with one stone.

You talk about it with whoever might be willing to listen and you feel on top of the world.

The first day? You are killing it. The second day? You are killing it.

The third day, you get sidetracked...

One month later? You haven't even achieved 10% of what you set out to do.

You were supposed to be able to do it in three months by focusing intensely.

Now, this seem very compromised. You feel miserable and guilty. You wonder if you are any good at anything.

This scenario keeps happening again, again, and again... Until you give up or you stumble upon the truth.

Let's give a closer look at your primary hypothesis.

So you were thinking you can do it in just three months by focusing intensely?

Well good news, you were half right.

You can do it...

...But not in three months.

Why?

Because even though you can focus intensely consistently on the subject you are curious about.

You can't stay curious about the same subject consistently.

So your curiosity will lead you to places you can't predict.

You just know one thing for sure, if you were interested in something one day, you will be interested in that thing again. You just can't predict when.

You will actually bring that project to completion effortlessly, but not in the shortest time possible.

Instead of the three months, you estimated, it will likely be six to nine months.

And that's ok, because that won't be the only thing you have done in those six to nine months.

You have an unprecedented capacity for multithreading, you just can't allocate all your threads to one project. It must be different projects. This is how you are.

If you are curious about something, you will want to drop the ball on your current project to satisfy your curiosity. And you must do it.

But every time you follow your curiosity you must find a way to get away with more than just knowledge.

Unused knowledge is ephemeral, vanishing as swiftly as it was acquired.

You must build something from the fruit of your recently acquired knowledge that will stand the test of time and bring you a small but lasting advantage.

It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be there.

THE KEY THING TO TAKE AWAY FROM THIS: You must shift from a consumer to a producer.

You must start producing stuff. Start businesses, start a blog, do everything you want, but DO. (keyword do, not just read about/learn about etc....)

It's normal for you to getting informed about something you are interested in, but you need to act on it. You must build something out of it. You must share it with the world.

You must create things and release them in the world. I REPEAT. You must create things and release them in the word.

You don't have to follow a great mastermind plan, you don't have to follow a routine or fixed planning. You don't have to torture yourself to heck out every last bit of productivity there's inside you.

You just need to listen to yourself and follow your curiosity. And to do it everyday.

Your strength is the speed at which you can pivot.

You can change your mind and start working on something different than what you were doing, at full speed, and immediately.

You can survey a complicated question an bring back multiple possible answers at the speed of light.

You are impulsive and adaptable. You can do anything you want because you will always find a way... As long as you are interested.

This surges of productivity come at a cost. Your interest in a particular thing has a very short shelf-life. One to two days top. Sometimes it's less than a couple of hours.

If you don't catch the wave of curiosity, it's gone, and sometimes it's gone for several weeks or months.

So expecting yourself to work on the same project, without interruptions every day for three months in a row? ... You are being oblivious to your own nature, my friend.

You probably know that by now, the biggest predictor of entrepreneurial success is consistency.

Then how can you expect success if you can't stay on track and schedule for more than two weeks?

You need to build a different kind of consistency than a rigid routine and prison-like tight schedules.

You need to play on your strength: Explore and Exploit ASAP.

Don't explore something without bringing back a treasure from your adventure.

Examples:

• You were curious about nutrition and muscle-growth gym regimen? You binge-learned every possible way to do it (instead of doing your job lol). You just acquired way too much knowledge to expect yourself to remember it a week from now. So applying it consistently? Out of your league.
  The solution? Swiftly assemble a training and nutrition guide based on what you just explored, package it in a nice PDF, and then share it with the world. You can decide to monetize it or just to share it for free on a forum, it doesn't matter. It will help some people, and that's good for your karma. Second benefit, the day you will want to actually go to the gym, you can just follow your own guideline. Two birds, one stone.
• You are learning Python and discover the weird world of Decorators and Closures. This stuff is basically out of your league and at your level you will probably never use it. But you can't shake off the feeling. You start binging and learning mystical stuff. Before you go back to the real world to what will actually move you forward in the grand scheme of things, put on together in one shot a blog post that you will publish on Medium behind the paywall. Boom! Three birds, one stone: Personal Branding & Portfolio : check; a very slim source of additional passive income: check; a quick way to retrieve your long-lost knowledge about closures when you finally need it, three years from now: check.
• Well you see the idea, indulge your instinct and before the honeymoon ends, build something that will last. In this way, you will shift from an inconsistent being to a prolific and polymath builder. You will shift from consumer to producer.

So by now, if you are an ENTP, you are probably envisioning what I am talking about.

I want to add a couple of other points... Playing on your strength also means you need to mitigate your weakness.

Your strength and weaknesses are two faces of the same coin. You can't get one without the other.

During my short time on earth as an entrepreneurial ENTP, I have summarized below everything I know about mitigating our innate weaknesses.








Weakness mitigation tips #1: You can only respect HARD DEADLINES.

There's two kind of deadlines: HARD deadlines and SOFT deadlines.

HARD deadlines are deadlines you must respect. When you are under hard deadlines, you work like crazy to respect them. Those are often imposed by a promise or the external environment. Hard Deadlines are why you have so much work ethic when you work for somebody else.

SOFT deadlines are deadlines you don't have obligation to respect. Basically they are deadlines you can bullshit yourselves out of easily. Often those are arbitrary and self-imposed, for example, SMART Goals. Soft deadlines are why you have so few work ethic when you work for yourself.

The litmus test is simple, "Can I find a way to not respect that deadline?".
If you start generating a thousand ideas about how to do so, then it's a soft deadline and this deadline means nothing to you and will bring you nothing. (except guilt)

So you being too clever may start to think? "Oh, gotcha I just need to change every deadline into a HARD deadline".

NO! Don't do this. The only way to do this is to take risks and to put yourself at a disadvantage. You are basically gambling on yourself just to create the pressure necessary to do the work. This is a horrible way to live your life.

(ex of this destructive behavior: Damaging relationships just to be sure you will do something. Wasting all your money to let the pressure of feeding your family let you work like crazy, etc...)

As an ENTP what you crave is freedom, this way of proceeding (a.k.a. burn your bridges) is the polar opposite of freedom. It will make you feel miserable and burn you out, also it sucks because you are destructing what you build to build more. This is terrible. Don't do it.

Just understand that soft deadlines mean nothing to you and plan accordingly.

Don't gamble on a deadline you can bullshit yourself out of.

Soft deadlines are a distraction to you, those are noise. SMART goals stuff like that, forget those, they don't work with you.

But also, don't take on too many hard deadlines at the same time.

Those hard deadlines are like prison chains to you. And what you crave is freedom.

If you enchain yourself too much, you will burnout.

This leave the question. How an ENTP can get stuff done?

Weakness Mitigation tip #2: Boredom is like a steel wall to you. You can't get through it and have to wait for the door of curiosity to open.

So what should I do? The ENTP equivalent of taking massive actions.

You must play to your strength and mitigate your weakness.

Follow your curiosity and build something from your exploration. Build it quickly, in a couple of hours or max. You must build it before your curiosity wither.

Understand that boredom is your limit. You can only go through boredom excruciatingly. This is your hard deadline for every project, you must finish the milestone before boredom takes you and your curiosity wants to go somewhere else.

A quick note about perfection?
What you build must never be perfect. Perfection is your enemy, it makes you anxious and buries you in analysis paralysis. (= you don't do shit and feel shitty about it)

What should I do when I am bored with a project and want to do something else?

You must stop and do something else. You will get back to the project eventually if you were interested once, you will be interested twice.

Weakness Mitigation tip #3: Don't make plans more detailed than a rough outline.

A detailed and carefully crafted plan is wasted on you... You will never follow it through.

Don't spend time creating detailed stratagems to get to your goals. THIS IS A WASTE OF TIME, DO SOMETHING ELSE INSTEAD.

You are tactical and agile. The time horizon you can plan on is limited to a couple of hours. It's very short.

For the long term, you can guess how things are gonna roughly. Your intuition power is often on point.

It's even more powerful when you feed your intuition with data. How do you get your data?

Every time you want to plan your future, turn to your past instead and log what you have been doing in the last few days.

You want to empirically determine your speed of production. Take the time to keep track of what you did during the day.

You can use this basic template:

Questions to gather data about your explorations:
1. What have I been interested in the last few day?
2. How did I go about exploring that interests?
3. What did I get out of it?
4. How long did it took?
5. What have I build-out of what I discovered? How have I used it?
6. How long did it took?
7. Is there thing I can do better next time? Things I need to avoid next time?

Answer those questions every two to three days. (Optimally, every time you finish a cycle of Exploration / Exploitation)

Store those answers in a way you can easily access those later. (Don't just write on a spare napkin and throw it away).

Weakness Mitigation tip # 4: Don't try to follow a perfect routine.

In the same way, hard deadlines are a chain to you, trying to respect arbitrary daily planning will lower your available energy for the day.

Instead, have a shortlist of 5 mandatory items you must do during the day and that you can do quickly.

If you can't cross every item of that list in less than 100 minutes, the list is too long.

An example can be:

• Meditate 10 minutes.
• Walk the dog.
• Do the dishes.
• Quick workout at the gym.
• Write in my journal.

Sometimes you will meditate in the morning, sometimes before you go to bed, sometimes during the commute. Doesn't matter, you need the flexibility to do things when you are ready for those.

What matters is that you crossed every item of the list, not when you crossed those.

The rest of the day, follow your curiosity relentlessly and get something out of it.

Weakness Mitigation tip #5: Keep your Anxiety in check... It keeps your from entering a Flow state.

First of all, You must strive to get into Flow. Getting into flow every day is your bread and butter as an ENTP.

Though there's one thing that can keep you from entering a Flow state even if you are well rested, in good health, and will push you to immediate-rewards behavior.(ex:... alcohol, infinite scrolling, eating way too much sugar, gambling, buying spree, opening 200+ tabs on your web browser about a shitty subject you don't even care about)

This thing is Anxiety.

You must learn to effectively manage your anxiety level. Because when highly stressed and without a hard deadline, you are basically dysfunctional and will get nothing done.
(Please remember that high-stress level and hard pressure to get things done is a miserable way to live your life. It's okay once in a while but don't abuse it.)

So do things that help you rest and recover. Make a conscious effort to recover and balance your innate restlessness.
Examples:
- Sport you genuinely enjoy
- Meditation
- Light encounter with your social circle
- Playing games
- Read books unrelated to your goals. (fiction, or history)
- Get a massage.
- Dance, Concert, Restaurant
- Journaling, gratitudes etc...

Weakness Mitigation tip #6: Inject a bit of order in your life.

Then, because you are so future and possibly oriented you need help to organize things that happened in your past.

• Some of us are a mess when it comes to meetings and time constraints or remembering special events like birthdays. ⇒ Get a calendar, note everything inside, check it often.
• Your life memory is foggy at best and can't remember specifics even if you try hard, it often means you are totally wrong about your achievements and efforts (often wrongly believe you never did anything right) ⇒ Spend time every day to journal about your life, log your decisions and log your achievements. Include specifics like mood, time spent on task etc... When in doubt about what you have been doing, you can read those logs to help you access data you would have forget otherwise.
• Revisiting your life is very difficult for you as you get immediately distracted. If you believe you have a trauma from your childhood (and most people have) ⇒ Consider going to a psychologist who will guide you through the fumes of your past.
• You want a boost of productivity and increase your odds of success in the short term. ⇒ Get an accountability coach that will help you add some order in your life. (Getting a coach is one of the ways to help you achieve soft deadlines you would not be able to honor otherwise), it also helps you clarify and be more surgical about your focus.
• You forget the things your family / entourage needs you to do (do the laundry, send wishes for birthday etc...)

Weakness Mitigation tip #7: Become more aware of your mind, thoughts and body.

You must strive to be aware of your mental state, to identify when you start to get bored and must finish asap or to identify when you are curious about something.

The best way to do so is to practice mindfulness meditation (yes seriously) and to do sports that demand to be aware of the mind-body connection.

This will help you be more tuned toward your sensations and thoughts. Which is key to live a more fluid and free life.

Weakness Mitigation tip #8: GET RID OF YOUR PHONE / SOCIAL MEDIA
Phones are engineered to suck your attention away from whatever your doing. Your attention is a raw resource they monetize.

As an ENTP you are curious and novelty-seeker, and you are very competent at indulging your curiosity for hours on end.

Attention vampires have access to brilliant minds that they pay a lot to spend their day engineering way to suck your attention for the sake of ad profits.

Against a phone, you are at the bottom of the food chain.

PHONES ARE YOUR NATURAL ENEMY.

Possible solutions to mitigate the damage from your phone:
- Destroy it.
- Use apps blocker like STAY-FOCUSED (android)
- Use phone blocker like FOREST. (ps: it doubles as a Pomodoro app, and is gamified which makes you less likely to bypass it, you sly fox)
- Use a way to track and realize how much time you waste on your phone, like STAY-FOCUSED. (prepare to be shocked)
- Change the color of your phone in grey-scale or invert white/black, attention vampires use flashy colors to suck you in, you can fight that by getting rid of colors.
How to do it with iPhone here, and how to do it with Android here.
- Destroy it.
- Buy a NOKIA 3310, a hand-held GPS, a vintage MP3 player, a nice watch, and a paper agenda. If you think about it, everybody has a phone so you don't really need one, as you can just ask to borrow the functionality you lack.

I repeat. GET RID OF YOUR PHONE. Thank me later.

Weakness Mitigation tip #9: You don't do well in a pond of sharks, you need a supportive and encouraging environment.

You are trusting and willing to see the best face of everyone you meet. You want to collaborate and share your knowledge.

You are good in a team and with people, especially when you can assume everybody is on the same side.

You want to trust people, and you usually demonstrate trust first. Keep doing that, it's one of your competitive edges.

But a word of caution, trusting people first doesn't mean people should be safe double-crossing you.

Of course, some foe will want to abuse your willingness to help.

If somebody abuses your trusting identity YOU MUST RETALIATE. I am serious.

You will know when somebody abuses your kindness. Your Machiavellian side will know immediately. DON'T MAKE EXCUSES FOR THE VILLAINS.

THEY CROSS YOU, YOU CROSS THEM. PERIOD.

ONCE YOU HAVE DEMONSTRATED YOU CAN BITE AS WELL AS YOU CAN SMILE and both sides are bleeding, YOU CAN THEN SHOW FORGIVENESS.

AFTER ALL, YOU DON'T LIKE CONFLICT.

This assumes that you are evolving in an environment where people willing to screw you are an anomaly, and most people are on your side.

If you realize that people wanting to screw you over are the norm, then you are in a pond of shark AND YOU MUST RUNAWAY ASAP.

Let the evil political game and the House of Cards vibe for the people who thrive in those corrosive environments.

This is not you.

You will thrive more in a group that is trusting and encouraging, united in a common cause.

The fact that you have a developed Machiavellian mind doesn't mean you must use it at 100%.

If people around you are mean, calculating, or vain. Leave, without looking back.

Weakness Mitigation tip #10: Don't bet on speed. Build an advantage for the long game instead.

Because, when you start out as an ENTP, you will never be the first to arrive somewhere... (When you will become an experienced ENTP, this will change, as your tactical velocity will be unheard of, but when you start, well... You are not the fastest.)
... You must not pick your battles based on rewards correlated with a short time to arrival... (Example, you are starting out with dropshipping, you see everybody is going for fidget spinners. Don't go for it, you will arrive after the battle.)
... Instead, You must pick your battle based on long term compounded rewards. (Example, learning skills that are difficult and valuable to master. Code, Copywriting, Writing, Consulting.)

Then once you start to have an edge that is difficult to replicate...(Example; you are a blockchain enthusiast, but you probably know things more in-depth than most of the other blockchain enthusiasts.)
... Pick a battle that will complement it and that triggers your curiosity (Example, starting a blog about blockchain + learning how to do first-class SEO).

Even though everybody was faster than you in the short run... (Example, your accountability partner Tom became a millionaire just in two years, and you were still in your parent basement)
... On the long run, you will establish a valuable strategic advantage that is hard for anybody else to replicate. (Example: Five years later, your Blockchain blog is ranked first on google and is monetized with ads, You keep getting people asking you to interview you and you started a consulting business about blockchain. You never made that much money in your life and you now have a strong network. You basically do what you want, when you want, with who you want, from anywhere you want.).




....


Alright I am getting bored, just one last thing before we go...

TLDR: implement the code written below in your daily life. It will do the trick, I know you will figure out the specifics on your own.

ENTP?

Be Patient and Restless

⬪

You must be patient in the long term.

You will get where you want.

But you won't get there in the shortest amount of time possible.

Because you will take so many detours.

So be patient.

⬪

You must be restless in the sort term.

Want to explore an option, fine, do it.

Go all the way.

Unleash your curiosity.

... But you must make a pact with yourself.

Every time you unleash your curiosity, you must build a memento and share it with the world.

A simple recipe...

1/ Explore until bored.

2/ Quickly build something valuable for others.

3/ Share it to the people who most need it.

You are an explorer and every time you go on an adventure, you bring back wonderful treasures, undiscovered before.

Promise yourself you won't keep those treasures to yourself and will share those with the world.

Once your oath is taken, go.

Explore.

Follow your curiosity relentlessly.

Everyday.

You are free now.

⬪

​

BONUS:

What does it look like when you are not playing to your strength and mitigating your weakness?:

You are doing something, let's call it interest A. You begin to be interested in interest B.
You decide to keep doing interest A.
You slowly get bored and pick up your phone.
Five hours later, you haven't finished working on interest A.
You feel guilty and have trouble falling asleep this evening.
You wake up, lethargic, it takes you four hours before finally getting to work on interest A.
It's excruciatingly boring but you manage to finish it. You begin to be interested in interest C.
You repress it and start working on interest B.
And so on and so on....

It feels like an uphill battle.

Also, it's depressing because you know your current velocity of execution is nowhere near your actual potential...

What does it look like when you play to your strength and mitigate your weaknesses?

You are doing something, let's call it interest A. You begin to be interested in interest B.

You switch your focus on interest B.
Five hours later you know everything you could know about interest B. You are still hungry for more.
You decide to produce something about your discovery. (for the sake of example and to give you an idea of what it could be, let's say it's an article you will put on medium behind the paywall and you include a bait to your newsletter.)
Three hours later you are done with the building phase, you share it with the world and go to bed.
You feel good and sleep well.
You wake up, early in the morning, your interest for interest A is back and you feel the urge to do something about it.
You jump out of bed and start working asap, forgetting breakfast. By noon you are done with interest A.
You begin to be interested in interest C. You start working immediately on interest C.
And so on and so on.

You are prolific and restless. Your cumulative speed of production is unheard of. You are proud of you.

Could you have been done with interest A sooner if you had double down on it? No. You can't get away with boredom. This is your limit.

This is why you need to be patient. You are like a wind vane, you keep turning. So you will get there. You just won't get there by the shortest path.

This is why you need to be restless. Because you have to take the detour and answer the calling of your curiosity, you have to move as fast as possible, or you will never finish anything.


....


Hope it helps,

Rémi

P.S.: Btw, from my slim understanding of typology, this can maybe apply also to INFP, ENFP, and INTP.

Great post! I couldn't agree more. It took me a while to figure some of this stuff out, and your knowledge/clarity/input are great additions.

I always point people to the Meyers Briggs test and Peter Drucker's "Managing Oneself"...

I appreciate you taking the time to write this and adding your mitigation strategies...

Valuable post for us ENTPs navigating through our journey of trying to execute! Hopefully other ENTPs can really grasp what you are saying and take action on it rather than it being hind sight

I completely locked myself up for the last 4 years... Like completely... Being 100% voluntarily celibate etc, had to live in the back of a warehouse for a bit, and created reasons that would force me into a "J" type execution.

The quote I have been using is to push is "People Don't Change Until The Pain Of Staying The Same Greater Than The Pain Of Change", and "Most People Give Up Right Before They Succeed" etc... it's been painful this way for sure...

However, I wasn't really sure how else to get myself to "do" what it took...(Hints why I appreciate the mitigation strategies) It did help me with my investing partners by gaining trust through commitment over time. It also kept costs low and allowed us to bootstrap.

 

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[Nahmed8]

Hello friends, are you an ENTP? Are you struggling with finishing things? Are you wondering why you can't seem to follow the monk-like discipline you crave so much?

This post is for you. (ps: This post may also apply to INTP, INFP, and ENFP, but it's not guaranteed. It has been primarily written for my fellow ENTP in mind.)

If you are a bit like me, and you probably are, you admire people of the ENTJ or INTJ types. The Elon Musks, the smart lads with the incredible power of execution.

They decide to do something and they just do it.

And you want that power, you want to be awesome at execution...

You have so many ideas (that you believe are amazing and revolutionary) if you concretize those ideas you will be on top of the world, don't you?

But when you start to work on them on your own, as a side-project or a business, your work ethic is gone, nowhere to be seen.

That's weird because you have an incredible work ethic everywhere else, be it at your job or in a team. You are always craving to learn more and become better. You always produce top-grade stuff and you are relentless. You are proud of this. And people agree with that statement.

You then, think you can make it out on your own, as skillful as you are, it would be a shame not to try.

But when you take the leap, you come to quickly realize, it's gonna be hard than expected.

First obstacle? Yourself.

You just can't seem to do what you know needs to be done.

You face a procrastination level more intense than anything you've never met in your life. Except maybe for that time you wanted to confess your love to your crush as a teenager.

You need to understand you are not a cold-blooded strategist that will follow a plan to completion.

You must understand this: You are an explorer! You go where your interest leads you. And when you are motivated by a will to explore your curiosity, YOU ARE UNSTOPPABLE.

The other side of the coin says, when you are disinterested in the tasks at hand, you feel bored as hell and will probably find a way to escape from doing the tasks at hand.

Your driving force is not the perspective of making shit loads of cash, neither it is the perspective of freedom, and sorry to break it to you, your driving force is not your desire to change the world for the better.

Your driving force is your curiosity. This is your motor.

With curiosity, you are a tsunami. Nothing will get in the way of the answer you seek.

Without curiosity, you are very good at finding excuses to not do what bores you out.

Why does it matter?

It matters because you will probably do the following mistake...

You will decide on a goal and following contemporary advice decide to make it S.M.A.R.T. Which basically means realistic with an arbitrary deadline.

Your strategizing mind will help you devise a sound plan of action, and your knack for creativity help you discerned a way you can even kill two birds with one stone.

You talk about it with whoever might be willing to listen and you feel on top of the world.

The first day? You are killing it. The second day? You are killing it.

The third day, you get sidetracked...

One month later? You haven't even achieved 10% of what you set out to do.

You were supposed to be able to do it in three months by focusing intensely.

Now, this seem very compromised. You feel miserable and guilty. You wonder if you are any good at anything.

This scenario keeps happening again, again, and again... Until you give up or you stumble upon the truth.

Let's give a closer look at your primary hypothesis.

So you were thinking you can do it in just three months by focusing intensely?

Well good news, you were half right.

You can do it...

...But not in three months.

Why?

Because even though you can focus intensely consistently on the subject you are curious about.

You can't stay curious about the same subject consistently.

So your curiosity will lead you to places you can't predict.

You just know one thing for sure, if you were interested in something one day, you will be interested in that thing again. You just can't predict when.

You will actually bring that project to completion effortlessly, but not in the shortest time possible.

Instead of the three months, you estimated, it will likely be six to nine months.

And that's ok, because that won't be the only thing you have done in those six to nine months.

You have an unprecedented capacity for multithreading, you just can't allocate all your threads to one project. It must be different projects. This is how you are.

If you are curious about something, you will want to drop the ball on your current project to satisfy your curiosity. And you must do it.

But every time you follow your curiosity you must find a way to get away with more than just knowledge.

Unused knowledge is ephemeral, vanishing as swiftly as it was acquired.

You must build something from the fruit of your recently acquired knowledge that will stand the test of time and bring you a small but lasting advantage.

It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be there.

THE KEY THING TO TAKE AWAY FROM THIS: You must shift from a consumer to a producer.

You must start producing stuff. Start businesses, start a blog, do everything you want, but DO. (keyword do, not just read about/learn about etc....)

It's normal for you to getting informed about something you are interested in, but you need to act on it. You must build something out of it. You must share it with the world.

You must create things and release them in the world. I REPEAT. You must create things and release them in the word.

You don't have to follow a great mastermind plan, you don't have to follow a routine or fixed planning. You don't have to torture yourself to heck out every last bit of productivity there's inside you.

You just need to listen to yourself and follow your curiosity. And to do it everyday.

Your strength is the speed at which you can pivot.

You can change your mind and start working on something different than what you were doing, at full speed, and immediately.

You can survey a complicated question an bring back multiple possible answers at the speed of light.

You are impulsive and adaptable. You can do anything you want because you will always find a way... As long as you are interested.

This surges of productivity come at a cost. Your interest in a particular thing has a very short shelf-life. One to two days top. Sometimes it's less than a couple of hours.

If you don't catch the wave of curiosity, it's gone, and sometimes it's gone for several weeks or months.

So expecting yourself to work on the same project, without interruptions every day for three months in a row? ... You are being oblivious to your own nature, my friend.

You probably know that by now, the biggest predictor of entrepreneurial success is consistency.

Then how can you expect success if you can't stay on track and schedule for more than two weeks?

You need to build a different kind of consistency than a rigid routine and prison-like tight schedules.

You need to play on your strength: Explore and Exploit ASAP.

Don't explore something without bringing back a treasure from your adventure.

Examples:

• You were curious about nutrition and muscle-growth gym regimen? You binge-learned every possible way to do it (instead of doing your job lol). You just acquired way too much knowledge to expect yourself to remember it a week from now. So applying it consistently? Out of your league.
  The solution? Swiftly assemble a training and nutrition guide based on what you just explored, package it in a nice PDF, and then share it with the world. You can decide to monetize it or just to share it for free on a forum, it doesn't matter. It will help some people, and that's good for your karma. Second benefit, the day you will want to actually go to the gym, you can just follow your own guideline. Two birds, one stone.
• You are learning Python and discover the weird world of Decorators and Closures. This stuff is basically out of your league and at your level you will probably never use it. But you can't shake off the feeling. You start binging and learning mystical stuff. Before you go back to the real world to what will actually move you forward in the grand scheme of things, put on together in one shot a blog post that you will publish on Medium behind the paywall. Boom! Three birds, one stone: Personal Branding & Portfolio : check; a very slim source of additional passive income: check; a quick way to retrieve your long-lost knowledge about closures when you finally need it, three years from now: check.
• Well you see the idea, indulge your instinct and before the honeymoon ends, build something that will last. In this way, you will shift from an inconsistent being to a prolific and polymath builder. You will shift from consumer to producer.

So by now, if you are an ENTP, you are probably envisioning what I am talking about.

I want to add a couple of other points... Playing on your strength also means you need to mitigate your weakness.

Your strength and weaknesses are two faces of the same coin. You can't get one without the other.

During my short time on earth as an entrepreneurial ENTP, I have summarized below everything I know about mitigating our innate weaknesses.








Weakness mitigation tips #1: You can only respect HARD DEADLINES.

There's two kind of deadlines: HARD deadlines and SOFT deadlines.

HARD deadlines are deadlines you must respect. When you are under hard deadlines, you work like crazy to respect them. Those are often imposed by a promise or the external environment. Hard Deadlines are why you have so much work ethic when you work for somebody else.

SOFT deadlines are deadlines you don't have obligation to respect. Basically they are deadlines you can bullshit yourselves out of easily. Often those are arbitrary and self-imposed, for example, SMART Goals. Soft deadlines are why you have so few work ethic when you work for yourself.

The litmus test is simple, "Can I find a way to not respect that deadline?".
If you start generating a thousand ideas about how to do so, then it's a soft deadline and this deadline means nothing to you and will bring you nothing. (except guilt)

So you being too clever may start to think? "Oh, gotcha I just need to change every deadline into a HARD deadline".

NO! Don't do this. The only way to do this is to take risks and to put yourself at a disadvantage. You are basically gambling on yourself just to create the pressure necessary to do the work. This is a horrible way to live your life.

(ex of this destructive behavior: Damaging relationships just to be sure you will do something. Wasting all your money to let the pressure of feeding your family let you work like crazy, etc...)

As an ENTP what you crave is freedom, this way of proceeding (a.k.a. burn your bridges) is the polar opposite of freedom. It will make you feel miserable and burn you out, also it sucks because you are destructing what you build to build more. This is terrible. Don't do it.

Just understand that soft deadlines mean nothing to you and plan accordingly.

Don't gamble on a deadline you can bullshit yourself out of.

Soft deadlines are a distraction to you, those are noise. SMART goals stuff like that, forget those, they don't work with you.

But also, don't take on too many hard deadlines at the same time.

Those hard deadlines are like prison chains to you. And what you crave is freedom.

If you enchain yourself too much, you will burnout.

This leave the question. How an ENTP can get stuff done?

Weakness Mitigation tip #2: Boredom is like a steel wall to you. You can't get through it and have to wait for the door of curiosity to open.

So what should I do? The ENTP equivalent of taking massive actions.

You must play to your strength and mitigate your weakness.

Follow your curiosity and build something from your exploration. Build it quickly, in a couple of hours or max. You must build it before your curiosity wither.

Understand that boredom is your limit. You can only go through boredom excruciatingly. This is your hard deadline for every project, you must finish the milestone before boredom takes you and your curiosity wants to go somewhere else.

A quick note about perfection?
What you build must never be perfect. Perfection is your enemy, it makes you anxious and buries you in analysis paralysis. (= you don't do shit and feel shitty about it)

What should I do when I am bored with a project and want to do something else?

You must stop and do something else. You will get back to the project eventually if you were interested once, you will be interested twice.

Weakness Mitigation tip #3: Don't make plans more detailed than a rough outline.

A detailed and carefully crafted plan is wasted on you... You will never follow it through.

Don't spend time creating detailed stratagems to get to your goals. THIS IS A WASTE OF TIME, DO SOMETHING ELSE INSTEAD.

You are tactical and agile. The time horizon you can plan on is limited to a couple of hours. It's very short.

For the long term, you can guess how things are gonna roughly. Your intuition power is often on point.

It's even more powerful when you feed your intuition with data. How do you get your data?

Every time you want to plan your future, turn to your past instead and log what you have been doing in the last few days.

You want to empirically determine your speed of production. Take the time to keep track of what you did during the day.

You can use this basic template:

Questions to gather data about your explorations:
1. What have I been interested in the last few day?
2. How did I go about exploring that interests?
3. What did I get out of it?
4. How long did it took?
5. What have I build-out of what I discovered? How have I used it?
6. How long did it took?
7. Is there thing I can do better next time? Things I need to avoid next time?

Answer those questions every two to three days. (Optimally, every time you finish a cycle of Exploration / Exploitation)

Store those answers in a way you can easily access those later. (Don't just write on a spare napkin and throw it away).

Weakness Mitigation tip # 4: Don't try to follow a perfect routine.

In the same way, hard deadlines are a chain to you, trying to respect arbitrary daily planning will lower your available energy for the day.

Instead, have a shortlist of 5 mandatory items you must do during the day and that you can do quickly.

If you can't cross every item of that list in less than 100 minutes, the list is too long.

An example can be:

• Meditate 10 minutes.
• Walk the dog.
• Do the dishes.
• Quick workout at the gym.
• Write in my journal.

Sometimes you will meditate in the morning, sometimes before you go to bed, sometimes during the commute. Doesn't matter, you need the flexibility to do things when you are ready for those.

What matters is that you crossed every item of the list, not when you crossed those.

The rest of the day, follow your curiosity relentlessly and get something out of it.

Weakness Mitigation tip #5: Keep your Anxiety in check... It keeps your from entering a Flow state.

First of all, You must strive to get into Flow. Getting into flow every day is your bread and butter as an ENTP.

Though there's one thing that can keep you from entering a Flow state even if you are well rested, in good health, and will push you to immediate-rewards behavior.(ex:... alcohol, infinite scrolling, eating way too much sugar, gambling, buying spree, opening 200+ tabs on your web browser about a shitty subject you don't even care about)

This thing is Anxiety.

You must learn to effectively manage your anxiety level. Because when highly stressed and without a hard deadline, you are basically dysfunctional and will get nothing done.
(Please remember that high-stress level and hard pressure to get things done is a miserable way to live your life. It's okay once in a while but don't abuse it.)

So do things that help you rest and recover. Make a conscious effort to recover and balance your innate restlessness.
Examples:
- Sport you genuinely enjoy
- Meditation
- Light encounter with your social circle
- Playing games
- Read books unrelated to your goals. (fiction, or history)
- Get a massage.
- Dance, Concert, Restaurant
- Journaling, gratitudes etc...

Weakness Mitigation tip #6: Inject a bit of order in your life.

Then, because you are so future and possibly oriented you need help to organize things that happened in your past.

• Some of us are a mess when it comes to meetings and time constraints or remembering special events like birthdays. ⇒ Get a calendar, note everything inside, check it often.
• Your life memory is foggy at best and can't remember specifics even if you try hard, it often means you are totally wrong about your achievements and efforts (often wrongly believe you never did anything right) ⇒ Spend time every day to journal about your life, log your decisions and log your achievements. Include specifics like mood, time spent on task etc... When in doubt about what you have been doing, you can read those logs to help you access data you would have forget otherwise.
• Revisiting your life is very difficult for you as you get immediately distracted. If you believe you have a trauma from your childhood (and most people have) ⇒ Consider going to a psychologist who will guide you through the fumes of your past.
• You want a boost of productivity and increase your odds of success in the short term. ⇒ Get an accountability coach that will help you add some order in your life. (Getting a coach is one of the ways to help you achieve soft deadlines you would not be able to honor otherwise), it also helps you clarify and be more surgical about your focus.
• You forget the things your family / entourage needs you to do (do the laundry, send wishes for birthday etc...)

Weakness Mitigation tip #7: Become more aware of your mind, thoughts and body.

You must strive to be aware of your mental state, to identify when you start to get bored and must finish asap or to identify when you are curious about something.

The best way to do so is to practice mindfulness meditation (yes seriously) and to do sports that demand to be aware of the mind-body connection.

This will help you be more tuned toward your sensations and thoughts. Which is key to live a more fluid and free life.

Weakness Mitigation tip #8: GET RID OF YOUR PHONE / SOCIAL MEDIA
Phones are engineered to suck your attention away from whatever your doing. Your attention is a raw resource they monetize.

As an ENTP you are curious and novelty-seeker, and you are very competent at indulging your curiosity for hours on end.

Attention vampires have access to brilliant minds that they pay a lot to spend their day engineering way to suck your attention for the sake of ad profits.

Against a phone, you are at the bottom of the food chain.

PHONES ARE YOUR NATURAL ENEMY.

Possible solutions to mitigate the damage from your phone:
- Destroy it.
- Use apps blocker like STAY-FOCUSED (android)
- Use phone blocker like FOREST. (ps: it doubles as a Pomodoro app, and is gamified which makes you less likely to bypass it, you sly fox)
- Use a way to track and realize how much time you waste on your phone, like STAY-FOCUSED. (prepare to be shocked)
- Change the color of your phone in grey-scale or invert white/black, attention vampires use flashy colors to suck you in, you can fight that by getting rid of colors.
How to do it with iPhone here, and how to do it with Android here.
- Destroy it.
- Buy a NOKIA 3310, a hand-held GPS, a vintage MP3 player, a nice watch, and a paper agenda. If you think about it, everybody has a phone so you don't really need one, as you can just ask to borrow the functionality you lack.

I repeat. GET RID OF YOUR PHONE. Thank me later.

Weakness Mitigation tip #9: You don't do well in a pond of sharks, you need a supportive and encouraging environment.

You are trusting and willing to see the best face of everyone you meet. You want to collaborate and share your knowledge.

You are good in a team and with people, especially when you can assume everybody is on the same side.

You want to trust people, and you usually demonstrate trust first. Keep doing that, it's one of your competitive edges.

But a word of caution, trusting people first doesn't mean people should be safe double-crossing you.

Of course, some foe will want to abuse your willingness to help.

If somebody abuses your trusting identity YOU MUST RETALIATE. I am serious.

You will know when somebody abuses your kindness. Your Machiavellian side will know immediately. DON'T MAKE EXCUSES FOR THE VILLAINS.

THEY CROSS YOU, YOU CROSS THEM. PERIOD.

ONCE YOU HAVE DEMONSTRATED YOU CAN BITE AS WELL AS YOU CAN SMILE and both sides are bleeding, YOU CAN THEN SHOW FORGIVENESS.

AFTER ALL, YOU DON'T LIKE CONFLICT.

This assumes that you are evolving in an environment where people willing to screw you are an anomaly, and most people are on your side.

If you realize that people wanting to screw you over are the norm, then you are in a pond of shark AND YOU MUST RUNAWAY ASAP.

Let the evil political game and the House of Cards vibe for the people who thrive in those corrosive environments.

This is not you.

You will thrive more in a group that is trusting and encouraging, united in a common cause.

The fact that you have a developed Machiavellian mind doesn't mean you must use it at 100%.

If people around you are mean, calculating, or vain. Leave, without looking back.

Weakness Mitigation tip #10: Don't bet on speed. Build an advantage for the long game instead.

Because, when you start out as an ENTP, you will never be the first to arrive somewhere... (When you will become an experienced ENTP, this will change, as your tactical velocity will be unheard of, but when you start, well... You are not the fastest.)
... You must not pick your battles based on rewards correlated with a short time to arrival... (Example, you are starting out with dropshipping, you see everybody is going for fidget spinners. Don't go for it, you will arrive after the battle.)
... Instead, You must pick your battle based on long term compounded rewards. (Example, learning skills that are difficult and valuable to master. Code, Copywriting, Writing, Consulting.)

Then once you start to have an edge that is difficult to replicate...(Example; you are a blockchain enthusiast, but you probably know things more in-depth than most of the other blockchain enthusiasts.)
... Pick a battle that will complement it and that triggers your curiosity (Example, starting a blog about blockchain + learning how to do first-class SEO).

Even though everybody was faster than you in the short run... (Example, your accountability partner Tom became a millionaire just in two years, and you were still in your parent basement)
... On the long run, you will establish a valuable strategic advantage that is hard for anybody else to replicate. (Example: Five years later, your Blockchain blog is ranked first on google and is monetized with ads, You keep getting people asking you to interview you and you started a consulting business about blockchain. You never made that much money in your life and you now have a strong network. You basically do what you want, when you want, with who you want, from anywhere you want.).




....


Alright I am getting bored, just one last thing before we go...

TLDR: implement the code written below in your daily life. It will do the trick, I know you will figure out the specifics on your own.

ENTP?

Be Patient and Restless

⬪

You must be patient in the long term.

You will get where you want.

But you won't get there in the shortest amount of time possible.

Because you will take so many detours.

So be patient.

⬪

You must be restless in the sort term.

Want to explore an option, fine, do it.

Go all the way.

Unleash your curiosity.

... But you must make a pact with yourself.

Every time you unleash your curiosity, you must build a memento and share it with the world.

A simple recipe...

1/ Explore until bored.

2/ Quickly build something valuable for others.

3/ Share it to the people who most need it.

You are an explorer and every time you go on an adventure, you bring back wonderful treasures, undiscovered before.

Promise yourself you won't keep those treasures to yourself and will share those with the world.

Once your oath is taken, go.

Explore.

Follow your curiosity relentlessly.

Everyday.

You are free now.

⬪

​

BONUS:

What does it look like when you are not playing to your strength and mitigating your weakness?:

You are doing something, let's call it interest A. You begin to be interested in interest B.
You decide to keep doing interest A.
You slowly get bored and pick up your phone.
Five hours later, you haven't finished working on interest A.
You feel guilty and have trouble falling asleep this evening.
You wake up, lethargic, it takes you four hours before finally getting to work on interest A.
It's excruciatingly boring but you manage to finish it. You begin to be interested in interest C.
You repress it and start working on interest B.
And so on and so on....

It feels like an uphill battle.

Also, it's depressing because you know your current velocity of execution is nowhere near your actual potential...

What does it look like when you play to your strength and mitigate your weaknesses?

You are doing something, let's call it interest A. You begin to be interested in interest B.

You switch your focus on interest B.
Five hours later you know everything you could know about interest B. You are still hungry for more.
You decide to produce something about your discovery. (for the sake of example and to give you an idea of what it could be, let's say it's an article you will put on medium behind the paywall and you include a bait to your newsletter.)
Three hours later you are done with the building phase, you share it with the world and go to bed.
You feel good and sleep well.
You wake up, early in the morning, your interest for interest A is back and you feel the urge to do something about it.
You jump out of bed and start working asap, forgetting breakfast. By noon you are done with interest A.
You begin to be interested in interest C. You start working immediately on interest C.
And so on and so on.

You are prolific and restless. Your cumulative speed of production is unheard of. You are proud of you.

Could you have been done with interest A sooner if you had double down on it? No. You can't get away with boredom. This is your limit.

This is why you need to be patient. You are like a wind vane, you keep turning. So you will get there. You just won't get there by the shortest path.

This is why you need to be restless. Because you have to take the detour and answer the calling of your curiosity, you have to move as fast as possible, or you will never finish anything.


....


Hope it helps,

Rémi

P.S.: Btw, from my slim understanding of typology, this can maybe apply also to INFP, ENFP, and INTP.

I think you just summarised me as a person, thank you for writing this amazing post. You have opened my eyes to my biggest weakness of not being able to stay consistent on one project.

Thanks, Naeem

 

[Simon Angel]

View attachment 34577

I guess I am pretty strongly an ENTJ these days. Introduction | Commander (ENTJ) Personality | 16Personalities

Either you always were an ENTJ or you are answering based on your life experience. ENTPs can LOOK like ENTJs but they do not THINK like ENTJs. Try answering based on your early 20s self!

 

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[LifeTransformer]

I checked back to 2015 - should be a millionaire by now - and my first reply to a personality test said INTP.

After doing the test again recently, still INTP.

This thread is absolute gold! I = Introvert right? E = Extrovert? So it most definitely applies to INTP in my opinion. I can can go ENTP under the right circumstances too

Anyway, what I wanted to say is; I think this thread might have finally unlocked a missing piece of "the puzzle" I've read so many things, got so many ideas, etc. But execution was and is always terrible. I now think it is because of my personality type, and this thread made so much damn sense to me!

Hopefully this really is that missing link, and if it is I owe you one massive beverage of your choice!

 

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[Lee Wright]

So after my post above, I decided to look deeper into what my results might mean, and I also read @eliquid's excellent thread too.

I picked up the book "INTP" which I think was mentioned either here or that thread. and have been giving it a thorough look.

But, I got to a point where something doesn't quite seem right. It said about INTPs loving order? I'm chaotic, and if INTP is indeed Einstein's type, he used to say something almost the complete opposite of Marie Kondo; “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” and seemed quite chaotic himself from what I can gather...

Maybe that's where the extra letter at the end of the 16 personalities differentiates?

It said about INTPs "eating to eat, not for the joy of eating" or something along them lines, wheras I am definitely not in that camp, I'm quite a foodie lol

I know these tests are not going to be 100% accurate, but something about that makes me question the typing, I have checked multiple times, I only switch between ENTP/INTP

Just wondering if anybody has any further insight who's deeper down the rabbit hole than myself?

I'm INTP too - checked it twice 10 years apart. I'm terribly messy at home or in my car yet when I do a job for someone else I'm very tidy - go figure!

 

[Einfamilienhaus]

The most important question is: Why this thread is not even marked as Notable?

 

[LifeTransformer]

You are confused because you're doing the garbage 16 Personalities test, which is basically a rebranded Big Five Look up cognitive functions for your true type.



Whatever book you're reading that describes INTPs as liking order you can throw in the trash. Things INTPs do not like: Authority, order, routine, people who can't think out of the box, washing their teeth on a regular basis.

From your writing style I'm pretty sure you're an ENTP.

Thanks very much for your reply Simon, will definitely look into the cognitive functions more.

If my true type was ENTP that wouldn't surprise me. I think that other test you posted (I think it was you at least) pegged me as 70% ENTP.